This is part seven of PJ Media’s jaunt through the courses taught at the nation’s top ten law schools: “Do They Teach Law Anymore?”
Hans von Spakovsky and I are marching through the top ten ranked law schools by U.S. News and World Report and sharing with you what is being taught inside. The militancy and uselessness of the curriculum may astound many of you.
I already exposed the top-ranked law school,Yale, then Chicago and Harvard. Hans covered number two, Stanford, and also Columbia and Penn.
We have arrived at #7 — New York University School of Law, a school so obsessed with its image that it publishes a “branding guide” if you want to write about it.
We’ve shown that the radicalized course offerings at the previous six schools demonstrate that these elite law schools have become training academies not so much for effective and competent lawyers, but instead for militant and transformational radicals with a law degree.
It affects the nation as well as your lives. These graduates from elite law schools have outsized influence in government, on the courts, and in academia and corporate America. They have enjoyed an elevated brand, free from scrutiny from mainstream Americans.
NYU is no different.
Students at NYU received credit in a course that generates lawsuits against State Farm Insurance. The case claims that the automated fraud detection software that State Farm uses to catch insurance scammers discriminates against black customers.
Members of the “NYU Law Review,” not content to have their membership serve as a resume-inflating perk, have demanded cash for the privilege of writing articles such as “Queering the Welfare State: Paradigmatic Heteronormativity After Obergefell.”
Perhaps they are learning it in class, because a tour of the NYU law course catalog reveals more nutty stuff.
The Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic offers law students “tools and tactics of international environmental law and human rights to preserve the conditions for life on Earth for current and future generations of humans and non-humans.”
ERA’s projects tackle existential challenges to environmental justice and human rights, including the climate emergency, the destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems, threats to Indigenous peoples’ rights and territories, the global pollution crisis, and large-scale cruelty to animals and other species.
If NYU students aren’t satisfied upending the world order to protect snails, there is the Global Justice Clinic.
The Global Justice Clinic engages in work to prevent, challenge, and redress rights violations related to inequality. Recognizing that our location at a well-resourced law school in New York City gives us unique opportunities for advocacy and accountability, we seek to build partnerships with communities, grassroots organizations, and human rights groups negatively impacted by the U.S. and other Northern-based governments, companies, and institutions.
Remember where you heard it first – “Northern-based governments.” (nee, Imperialist, Colonizer, Conquistador, Catholic Missionary, British Royal Family).
If NYU students aren’t interested in fighting The Man globally, they can take on The Man locally in the Racial Justice and Abolition Clinic. There, Professor Jason Williamson will lead the fight against the:
myriad ways in which the criminal legal system, in particular, works to reinforce white supremacy and the legacy of slavery in the United States. Students will work in teams with attorneys and other advocates from Law for Black Lives, the Parole Preparation Project, Releasing Aging People in Prison, and the American Civil Liberties Union, to explore a range of advocacy and organizing strategies aimed at advancing an abolitionist vision of transformational change.
If students want to fight The Man hyper-locally, there is the “Reproductive Justice Clinic.” From the actual course catalog… I’m not making this up:
Reproductive justice means more than the right to abortion and contraception: it embraces a broader concept, opposing the use of reproduction—and, in particular, of pregnancy and parenting status—as a tool of oppression.
NYU law students will study how reproduction is a tool of oppression. These are the words that go together when a civilization forgets how it got there.
Just like students at the other top 10 law schools we have exposed, law students at NYU get course credit for helping Democrat Party priorities and opposing Republicans and conservative organizations. Students will:
work on behalf of reproductive justice grassroots membership organizations, reproductive health care workers and researchers and/or individuals targeted for government intervention because of their reproductive status. The Clinic’s work is on law- and policy-defining matters of national importance, frequently of national prominence. . . . Fieldwork projects run the gamut from legislative organizing, to regulatory advocacy, to media outreach and management, to pre-litigation research and assessment, to affirmative litigation in either direct services or impact capacities, and either representing a party to the litigation or as amicus curiae.
NARAL, Yes. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America?
Not on your life at NYU law.
No elite law school would be complete without a course dedicated to race-based benefits and color consciousness. Students at NYU can take Leadership Diversity and Inclusion. The course catalog:
Students will study concepts such as “unconscious bias,” “stereotype threat,” and “covering.” The course will place particular emphasis on race and gender. In addition, we will look at how organizations have adopted super-compliant measures to operate above the strict requirements of employment discrimination law through efforts such as choice architecture.
If NYU students are in a Great Society kind of mood, instead of talking about a revolution they can take Law of the Welfare State:
This course examines the history, principal policy choices and legal frameworks in government benefit programs and social welfare law directed to lower income persons and families. It will include some exploration of public policy, political and philosophical approaches to distributive justice and substantial and growing wealth and income inequality.
Another topic you won’t find in any American courtroom but will see taught at the law school at NYU is the course called Economic and Social Rights. This course isn’t about torts, the rules of evidence, civil procedure, preparing witnesses, writing a brief, or anything lawyers out here in the real world do. Instead, the course catalog:
Rapidly growing inequality around the world, a growing awareness of the fundamental importance of the structural underpinnings of racism, sexism and many other systemic violations of human rights, are all starting to focus long overdue attention on the importance of economic and social human rights. These include the rights to food, health, housing and education, and also labor rights and cultural rights. All of these rights are part of the International Bill of Rights, many have been explicitly recognized in national constitutions, and they are increasingly subject to judicial implementation in a range of countries. By the same token, they have been systematically ignored by many human rights advocates and have been a major casualty of the triumph of neoliberalism in the economic sphere.
For those of you in the real world, “major casualty of the triumph of neoliberalism” translates to liberty winning over government tyranny.
The professors who teach these courses at NYU hate the American system of limited government. It impairs their wild utopian dreams of controlling other people. The triumph of neoliberalism frustrates their desire to undo things like the free market and the limited Constitutional powers of the federal government.
Few professors at NYU embody this utopian power lust more than former White House counsel Bob Bauer.
Bauer is the NYU “Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Co-Director of the Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic.” Not long ago he was busy at the Obama White House transforming the country. Ten years ago, when the Obama IRS was targeting conservative groups, Bauer was calling for restrictions on their free speech rights. Bauer went so far as to advocate the criminalization of people who talk about voter fraud.
As I wrote a decade ago at PJ Media:
During the 2008 election, while representing the Obama campaign, Bauer sent a threatening letter to the Justice Department demanding criminal investigations of people who had the audacity to speak about voter fraud. Bauer even singled out Sarah Palin in the letter. Anyone who “developed or disseminated” information about voter fraud, to Bauer, deserved the heavy boot of a criminal investigation. Read the letter; it reveals a nasty, thuggish, and lawless attitude toward political opposition.
Bauer teaches the Role of the Lawyer in Public Life. That’s rich.
Read his letter, and imagine what the future looks like with lawyers at elite law schools taught by professors like Bob Bauer.
America’s elite law schools are pushing us to a dangerous place. The courses are no longer about law. They are about dismantling and replacing the American system of free speech, tolerance, limited government, and a citizenry willing and able to defend our liberties. No conservative judge, no politician, and no committee chair should hire a single lawyer schooled in this environment absent a demonstrated record of open resistance to the rot.
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